


And the Thunder Claps

by Ambrosia



Series: Familiars are Surprisingly Useful [4]
Category: Maleficent (2014), Sleeping Beauty (Fairy Tale)
Genre: F/M, I'm not even sure how this happened, Sleepy fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-26
Updated: 2014-07-26
Packaged: 2018-02-10 11:56:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2024220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ambrosia/pseuds/Ambrosia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>But her old scar itched, attached to wings that were taller than she was. “I don’t like this place,” Maleficent admitted, gesturing to the room. “I used to look at it when I was a child and wonder how they got enough sunlight inside to grow their beds.”</p><p>Diaval kicked his human feet out from the tangle of sheets and looked like he might make to get up, but Maleficent realized that he wasn’t wearing a shirt.</p><p>And she hadn’t noticed when exactly that’d happened</p>
            </blockquote>





	And the Thunder Claps

**Author's Note:**

> I totally didn't actually mean to get this written, but it was certainly helped by a recent piece of fanart by trustyservant over on tumblr which can be found: [Here](http://trustyservant.tumblr.com/post/92720773275/maleval-week-day-1-cuddling-shhh-just-pretend)
> 
>  
> 
> [tumblr](http://www.valorious.tumblr.com)

The castle was noisy, even so late into the night that it was technically early.

Maleficent’s long winter coat dragged behind her as she passed the open window for the third time, her longest feathers dragging over cool stone as she walked. 

The floor was stone. The high ceiling in their room was stone.And the walls were thick stone. 

All the candles that Aurora had been kind enough to send to this room had burnt out, so Maleficent had thrown all the windows open to let the early-winter chill seep in. 

The closeness of the room after so many years underneath open sky bothered Maleficent, if she stared at the ceiling for too long, but it wasn’t even that fact that bothered her the most. It was the echoes of iron. 

That faint scent of fire that would tickle her nose from time to time. 

It was ghosting over her skin like the burn of an iron net, and she even thought she could hear the echoes of a dragon’s roar.

But, Aurora had called, called them for official business of their now jointed kingdoms. 

And for all that she and Aurora had forged together, even the old smell of iron was not enough to keep Maleficent away. Even if it had given her pause at the great doors that led to the main hall. 

So Maleficent had come, and Diaval had come too, even if he had worn a smug look on his handsome face. 

But Maleficent couldn’t settle. This room in the tower was thankfully large enough so that her wings did not feel cramped, and large enough so that she could pace, barefooted, back and forth without hitting the bedposts. 

Why couldn’t morning arrive sooner? 

Her long fingers itched with magic. Old, hateful curses that would unfortunately forever mark the ground it had been made on, but Maleficent could still feel it, even if the people living here couldn’t. 

How was she supposed to make amends when her wings still twitched at the thought of an old glass box?

“Mistress?” a voice called, and she turned to see Diaval’s human form wrapped up in blankets on the cold stone floor, sleep-riddled and frustratingly endearing. 

His human hair was sticking up on one side, and it made the twitching in her fingers stop, if but for a moment. 

Maleficent put a hand to her head. Her restless magic must have woken him. “It’s nothing, Diaval,” she tried, quietly. “I just can’t sleep.” 

He blinked slowly twice. Diaval’s chest was twisted around oddly so that he could peer up at her from the floor, and only then did it strike Maleficent that not once had Diaval asked to sleep in another room, or even on the settee in the corner. 

He slept right next to her, as he did in their tree, where she slept on the branches, and he nestled into the roots. 

Normally he might ask to be a raven at night to sleep, even sometimes curled up beneath her chin if she was feeling generous. 

Her crinkled brow must have said something to him, because he pulled his weight up on his human forearms with a concerned, sleepy look on his face. “What’s the matter?” 

She shifted her weight from one foot to another. In the months since the return of her wings, her center of balance had significantly improved, but the old habit of having to take very careful steps with a walking stick remained. 

She could tell him, Maleficent realized. She could tell him that being in this cramped tower waiting for morning was driving her mad. 

There was nothing that she had not kept from him before, Maleficent thought, except that wasn’t true. She’d never actually told him that _Stefan_ had been the reason she had lost her wings. 

But her old scar itched, attached to wings that were taller than she was. “I don’t like this place,” Maleficent admitted, gesturing to the room. “I used to look at it when I was a child and wonder how they got enough sunlight inside to grow their beds.” 

Diaval kicked his human feet out from the tangle of sheets and looked like he might make to get up, but Maleficent realized that he wasn’t wearing a shirt. 

And she hadn’t noticed _when_ exactly that’d happened. 

But, Maleficent remembered, it’d happened often in the Moors. Diaval disliked the feeling of silk against his shoulders when he slept in his human form, and she might just understand why. 

It might feel like the brush of feathers, when he didn’t have any. Only temporary, of course, but the fear might have still been there. 

Suddenly Maleficent felt ridiculous. She hadn’t even offered to fetch him a more comfortable place to sleep, or even to return him to his feathered state so that he might at least get some rest, even if she didn’t. 

Even moreso because she realized, numbly, that she couldn’t sleep because she missed the comfort of his mindless chatter. 

“Come, you silly bird,” Maleficent sighed, pointing toward the bed. “You might as well have this, I doubt I’ll be using it.” 

Diaval looked, eyes half lidded, at her and at the bed and back and forth. He even tilted his head sideways as he might as a raven. 

But Diaval was apparently so tired that he slid into bed without regret or a second thought, curling onto his side like a cat against the cold.

He was asleep within moments. Maleficent eyed the blankets on the floor that he had vacated like they had done her a personal wrong, and with a flick of two fingers and a bit of golden dust, she banished them toward Diaval where they landed on his legs in a crumpled mound. 

She envied the way that he slept as a human. Even before her wings had been taken, sleeping had been a delicate ordeal. 

It had to be, when one had eight inch horns growing out of the sides of one’s head even when she had been small. 

And after had been even worse, the wounds left by Stefan’s ambition had left a hole that had never quite healed. It meant that, if Maleficent did get sleep, she did so by almost sitting upright and not resting the wrong parts of her shoulders against the tree bark. 

But, Diaval? Diaval slept with all his limbs tucked into a small circle, and yet still managed to take up more than half the bed. 

He looked comfortable.

He looked like he was dead to the entire world and all of Maleficent’s troubling thoughts. 

She envied him. 

Maleficent frowned. “Oh, of all the silly,” she said after a time, glancing at the bed and the man in it with eyes that probably glinted mischievous gold. She sized it up as she would have an army. 

Because Maleficent wanted to lie down. She was tired, her shoulders ached, and the bed looked moderately warm now that Diaval was in it; it would be a simple thing to carefully lie on her back so that her wings folded against her shoulders.

And it was only Diaval, after all. One snap of her fingers against his nose and he would be a barn owl or a tabby cat.

And her feet were cold. 

Honestly, it was that thought most of all that got Maleficent to sit down and pull her feet off the floor; even her faerie’s feet were becoming frigid. And it was easy enough when she focused on getting her miserable feet off the cold stone and underneath the blanket at the foot of the bed.

And the she was lying against a mound of pillows with her wings tucking themselves inward and getting comfortable. 

If only she had suspected that that’d be the easy bit.  

Comfort and warmth and the late hour of the early morning eventually edged Maleficent toward sleep, but just as she managed to slow her breathing, the mess beneath the mound of blankets turned over and fell right into Maleficent’s waiting arms.

“You’re cold,” Diaval complained, but he shifted down so that his head rested against her ribcage, instead of against her arm. 

“I was standing by the window,” was the only stupid thing she could get to come out of her stupid mouth. 

“Mm,” Diaval said, frowning. His arm was wrapped loosely around her chest. “You couldn’t fly out of that window,” he paused. “Your wings are far too big.” 

 _Of all the things he could be talking about_ , Maleficent cursed, because her hands were frozen mid-air and she sucked in a breath with all the strength she could muster so that she would not move against the solid wall of heat that was her servant.

Her heart was racing, her hands were trembling, she hadn’t been this close to another being in a very long time. Even at Aurora’s coronation as the Queen of the Moors, she and Diaval had just stood shoulder to shoulder on the cliff. 

Her first instinct was to flick him into another form, an easier form for her to deal with, anything but when he most often resembled a mortal man. 

But his face was peaceful, his eyes were closed, his torso lax. It took a moment, but Maleficent stopped the shaking in her hands and let a breath out that she had probably been holding for minutes.

“Diaval,” Maleficent whispered, trying not to move her head to look down at him. 

Her right hand landed on the top of his head. “Mm?” Was all he managed. 

His arm shifted against her side. 

Diaval had the gall to use her as a _pillow_. How he wasn’t something small and timid, Maleficent didn’t know. Fifteen years ago he would have been a hawk’s breakfast by now, but Maleficent’s fingers just slid easily through his dark raven’s hair. 

Like feathers, that helped. She’d done this dozens of times when he was a raven, and that helped her breathe a bit easier. 

“Mm,” Diaval said, turning his head as it lay against her breast so that her fingers could slide through more and scratch gently against his scalp.  

The stiffness seemed to bleed out and Maleficent slid further down onto the bed and off the pillows. Her shoulders seemed to collapse in on themselves until she was stuck against the solid wall of Diaval’s body that generated much more heat than she had expected. 

She sighed and turned so that she could see more than just the top of Diaval’s head. He was either very tired, which she couldn’t exactly blame him for, the sun was closer to rising than it was from being dark, or he was very good at playing sleep. 

 “I should turn you into something unpleasant,” Maleficent mused into his ear. 

Though that wasn’t exactly true; she couldn’t actually remember shifting him without his askance or permission since after Stefan. 

But it was nice to still be able to make the threat. 

“You wouldn’t,” he said, or at least she _thought_ he said. “You love me far too much to shift me when I’m sleeping.” 

The breath she had been carefully and slowly releasing got sucked back in, because that awful truth hit her where she thought she’d never get hit again. 

And that was an awful truth. 

It was the truth bit that bothered her. 

 _A raven_ , Maleficent thought, dragging a hand over her face. _Of all things, a shapeshifter._

“I could always do it for Aurora,” Maleficent managed after what seemed like years of silence. “She loved watching you change.” 

The hand that wasn’t threading through dark hair fell onto the arm that Diaval had looped around her midsection, and moved up onto his shoulder. 

Small things. She could do small things. 

“What would you turn me into?” he asked, sleep warping his words into sentences of warble. 

“A small dog,” Maleficent said, fingers smoothing the hair nearest his neck. “A dog so small you get carried in the bussom of ladies who use too much cloth for their clothing and have hats that are bigger than my horns.” 

He snorted into her chest, even between sleeping and waking, and Maleficent felt her heart most assuredly skip a beat.


End file.
